Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace

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Matt Taibbi: Goldman Sachs Has Made Fools Of Us All (VIDEO)
Posted by Dorsey Shaw, Air America Media on July 9, 2009 at 10:29 AM.

Sam Seder sits down with journalist Matt Taibbi whose most recent article in Rolling Stone magazine describes Goldman Sachs involvement in every market manipulation dating back to the Great Depression.

Watch:

Official Unemployment Hits 9.5% (Reality Even Worse)
Posted by Meteor Blades, Daily Kos on July 2, 2009 at 12:15 PM.

Unemployment rose to 9.5% in June, a 26-year high, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 14.7 million Americans are now officially out of work, and payroll employment has fallen by 6.5 million since the downturn began in December 2007, 19 months ago. The BLS also reported this morning that yet another 467,000 non-farm payroll jobs were lost in June. That was more than 100,000 above what a consensus of economists had estimated. Job losses in May were revised to 322,000 from an earlier estimate of 345,000.

The official count – known as U3 and dutifully reported by most of the media – fails to show the true extent of the wreckage. Left out of most reporting is U6, the BLS  calculation that includes involuntarily underemployed people. That is, those who want a full-time job, but can only find part-time work. Also missing from U3 are discouraged jobless people who haven’t looked for work during the past four weeks. The U6 figure rose in June to 16.5%.

The average workweek fell another 0.1 hour to 33 hours, the lowest since 1964 when the BLS began keeping statistics for that factor.

Another set of interconnected gauges of economic misery released today was the number of new claims filed for unemployment benefits, the four-week average of new claims, and the number of continuing claims. There were 614,000 new claims, the four-week average of claims – which levels ups and downs – dropped to 615,250, and continuing claims fell 53,000 to 6.7 million. The continuing claims number, however, may be affected by the fact that a growing number of out-of-work Americans have exhausted their benefits and no longer show up in these statistics. A little less than 40% of workers are covered by unemployment insurance.

In late May, 74% of economists surveyed by the National Association of Business Economists said the economy would begin expanding this quarter although they expected unemployment to continue rising into 2010 before beginning its recovery. One disturbing trend can be found in how long it took in the four previous recessions before the number of workers with jobs equaled the number employed at the beginning of those recessions. In 1974, the job recovery took 19 months; in 1981, 28 months; in 1991, 32 months; in 2001, 47 months.

Jack Healy of The New York Times reports:

"There are going to be massive, massive numbers of people who are out of work for long periods of time," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director for the National Employment Law Project. "It’s one of the most important aspects of where the economy is right now."

Although the number of people filing for unemployment insurance has leveled off recently, more workers are falling back on safety nets intended for the most troubled workers. More than 2.7 million people received emergency or extended unemployment benefits in the first week of June — the most recent period for which data was available — compared with 2 million at the beginning of the year.

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Thinking Chipotle For Lunch? Read This First If You Care About Workers' Rights
Posted by Peter Rothberg, TheNation.com on June 29, 2009 at 11:30 AM.

Last week, leaders of the food justice movement -- including Eric Schlosser, Raj Patel, Frances Moore Lappe, and Robert Kenner, producer and director of the new documentary Food, Inc. -- sent a strongly-worded letter to Chipotle demanding that they "work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as a true partner in the protection of farmworkers' rights."

The letter comes in the wake of a recent breakthrough for the Campaign for Fair Food -- Whole Foods' announcement that two of Florida's leading organic producers, Alderman Farms and Lady Moon Farms, will implement the company's agreement with the CIW, including the penny-per-pound wage increase and a strict code of conduct.

For decades, Florida's farmworkers have faced terrible abuses and brutal exploitation. Workers earn sub-poverty wages for toiling 60 to 70 hours per week in season, and some have even been chained to poles, locked inside trucks, beaten, and robbed of their pay.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has made great organizing strides and has succeeded in convincing numerous commercial giants, including both Burger King and Taco Bell, to increase wages, benefits and observe a strict set of guidelines outlining workplace safety rules.

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Happy Days Are Here Again (For the Masters of the Universe)
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on June 24, 2009 at 4:31 PM.

Happy days are here again ...

... for the masters of the universe anyway:

Citigroup Inc., the U.S. bank that got $45 billion of government funds, will raise base salaries by as much as 50 percent to help compensate for a reduction in annual bonuses, a person familiar with the plan said.

The biggest increases will go to investment bankers and traders, said the person who declined to be identified. Workers in consumer banking, credit cards, legal and risk management will see smaller salary adjustments. The New York-based company also plans to award stock options to try to keep employees after Citigroup’s market value plummeted 84 percent in the past year.

Citigroup joins Morgan Stanley and UBS AG in boosting salaries for executives and employees. Morgan Stanley said last month it will increase base pay for many of the New York-based firm’s top executives and double the pay of Chief Financial Officer Colm Kelleher.

“Citi continues to examine ways to ensure its employee compensation practices are competitive in this very challenging market environment,” Citigroup spokesman Stephen Cohen said yesterday, declining further comment.

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Bankrupt GM Begins Slashing Jobs
Posted by Harry Hanbury, American News Project on June 24, 2009 at 9:33 AM.

The General Motors flameout has been a disaster for blue collar Americans working on assembly lines. Out of 123,000 GM workers left in North America, 20,000 are scheduled to lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, the Auto Task Force appointed by President Obama to oversee the process is led by Wall Street financiers focused on a single goal — turning a profit and getting stock prices to rise. It's an approach that has some people worried.

It's Sleazy Union-Busters Versus the Pope!
Posted by Art Levine, AlterNet on June 23, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

While the Chamber of Commerce continues its smear campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act, the union movement enlisted a powerful ally yesterday in its drive for workers' rights: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, following the guidance of, yes, the Pope.

As the AFL-CIO blog noted:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has announced a new step forward for workers at Catholic health facilities: a set of principles to ensure that workers have a fair process to bargain for a better life.

In "Respecting the Just Rights of Workers: Guidance and Options for Catholic Health Care and Unions," the USCCB, in cooperation with Catholic health care providers and the union movement, has laid out guidelines for Catholic health care ministries across the country.

These guidelines, and the process that produced them, are an encouraging model of cooperation and collaboration in protecting workers' freedom to form unions and bargain.

The new guidelines cover seven principles for employers when workers seek a union:

* Respect;

* Access to information;

* Truthful communication;

* Pressure-free environment;

* Expeditious process;

* Honoring employee decisions; and

* Meaningful enforcement of these principles.

UPDATE: The Chamber of Commerce is coming under added fire today in a series of union-sponsored ads online and in political newspapers because of its alleged "two-faced" position on arbitration: for it when it stacks the deck for Big Business, and against it when workers seek it so they're not illegally denied a union contract. The new ad proclaims, under a photo of a working-class mother and her daughter, "One year after workers form unions, over half are still denied a contract by their employers."

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Colin Powell: Our Streets and Neighborhoods Bear the Indelible Marks of Immigrants’ Cultures
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on June 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

On February 5, 2009, General Colin Powell delivered an address at the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City University of New York. This is a condensed version of that speech.

M
	General Colin Powell.

I can’t think of a better place to talk about the integration of immigrant populations into America than in this city and at the City University of New York. The city of New York is celebrated around the world as the place where people from all over the world first come to America. You know about the Statue of Liberty and about Ellis Island. We have a museum on Ellis Island that commemorates those arrivals. Our streets and neighborhoods bear the indelible marks of immigrants’ cultures, their languages, their food, their ideas. Nowadays, there are many gateways into the U.S., but New York remains marked in a special way by its immigrant residents and by the neighborhoods and families they came to build over these many years. And it is important to note that people didn’t just come here to find jobs or to go to school. They came to be Americans, because that meant to come from anywhere in the world and take your place alongside other people from anywhere in the world, and for all to somehow belong to something new, something wonderful. Never forgetting your roots, never forgetting where you came from or where your family came from, but now you’re all one—a strong one in our great diversity. The city has thrived on its immigrant residents and there is a wise recognition in the policies of this city of how vital immigrants are to New York City and New York State.

Read the entire speech here.

A 'Perfect Storm for Disaster' Brewing With Washington's 'Unprecedented' Shadow Army
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 15, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

I’ve been reading through the hot-off-the-presses, exciting 100+ page report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting: “At What Cost? Contingency Contracting In Iraq and Afghanistan.” There have been several good pieces that covered the Congressional hearings related to this report, so I thought I would just post some of the more important excerpts from the report. One general note: The Commission, which was created due to the diligent efforts of Senators Jim Webb and Claire McCaskill, has been doing some incredibly important work digging deep into the corruption, waste, abuse, fraud, etc of the U.S. war contracting system. The statute that created the commission “requires the Commission to assess a number of factors related to wartime contracting, including the extent of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement of wartime contracts. The Commission has the authority to hold hearings and to refer to the Attorney General any violation or potential violation of law it identifies in carrying out its duties.”

While the new report reveals some critical details about issues of waste and abuse, the general tone is very pro-contractor, which is not surprising. However, I find it disturbing that one of the members of the Commission, Dov Zakheim, is, according to his Commission bio, a current vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense, homeland security and intelligence contractor with a direct stake in US policy on contractors.

Booze is now majority owned by The Carlyle Group, which has deep political connections. In an Op-ed in The Washington Post last year, Zakheim campaigned against “more regulations and bureaucratic restrictions on contractors” and advocated for “a larger, more diversified base of prime contractors and suppliers.” Zakheim, who was a foreign policy advisor to Bush and part of the circle of the Vulcans, is now a key member of the primary body that is responsible for investigating the industry and making formal recommendations on U.S. policy. While the Commission is made up of appointees from both political parties, (Zakheim was appointed by President Bush) Zakheim’s corporate stake on these matters should be cause for a review of his position on the Commission.

***

One fact that jumped out at me in the report is that, at present, according to the Commission, “contracting oversight” in Afghanistan is being done remotely from Iraq. And remember, there are 70,000 contractors (and growing) in Afghanistan.

Here are some excerpts from the report, which I have categorized and in some cases highlighted or analyzed:

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Obama, GM and Silly Psuedo-Constitutional Arguments
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on June 14, 2009 at 10:06 AM.

There's much to criticize in the government bail-outs of GM and Chrysler.

But WaPo editorial writer Charles Lane doesn’t worry about the fact that we’ve allowed companies deemed “too big to fail” to proliferate — firms that can be mismanaged into the ground and have every expectation of a tax-payer bailout. He doesn’t worry about the moral hazard inherent in that kind of state-supported capitalism -- of shifting risk from private investors to the American tax-payer -- or the fact that we'll subsidize Detroit auto-makers as they offshore scads of good manufacturing jobs.

Instead, he examines a conservative talking-point about the Mad Megalomania of Barack Obama and, in doing so, gives it weight and legitimacy it doesn't appear to merit.

Let’s take a look:

Nationalizing General Motors, and part of Chrysler, may or may not turn out to be a good deal for the taxpayers. I have a different concern, though: Was it constitutional?

With hundreds of thousands of jobs on the line, this may seem a churlish question. Then again, the temptation to bend the rules of democracy is always greatest in a crisis. It wasn't so long ago that a president claimed the power to do all sorts of questionable things -- from waterboarding to electronic surveillance -- because the country faced a crisis.  

Watch the writer’s trick: first draw a ridiculously false equivalence, and then assert that you’re not really saying what it seems you’re saying:

Bailing out Detroit is not in the same category, morally, as torture.

Good to know.

Still, a presidential decision to federalize a vast sector of the U.S. economy affects the country's vital interests and, potentially, the rights of its citizens. Such an extraordinary measure should rest on the firmest possible foundation of democratic legitimacy. Does President Obama's rescue of GM and Chrysler meet the test?

Lane then offers another dubious analog:

The classic statement on such matters comes from Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson's opinion in a case about another crisis-driven assertion of executive power: President Harry S. Truman's seizure of steel mills in 1952. Truman wanted to prevent a strike during the Korean War; the court blocked him.

Truman nationalized the steel mills to break a strike over wage controls.  The U.S. steel industry was profitable. GM and Chrysler were going belly-up, and the government intervened to save hundreds of thousands of jobs.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Threat To Capitalism
Posted by Eric Lotke, Campaign for America's Future on June 11, 2009 at 9:18 AM.

Eric Lotke is the author of 2044: The Problem Isn’t Big Brother, It’s Big Brother, Inc., a look at a not-so-distant dystopian future in which multinational corporations openly rule the world.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched yesterday “a sweeping national advocacy campaign … to defend and advance America’s free enterprise values in the face of rapid government growth and attacks by anti-business activists.”

The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t get it. They aren’t defending capitalism and free enterprise. They are all but destroying it.

Free-market fundamentalists don’t understand that capitalism is a system. It has rules, boundaries and obligations. When those rules are broken, the system falters.

• It’s not football without lines to mark touchdowns and out of bounds.

• It’s not basketball without a referee to call the fouls.

This is more than just a sports metaphor. Capitalism won’t work unless a negotiated price and promise to pay $100 is followed by payment of $100. And someone needs to enforce those rules. Otherwise it's not capitalism. It’s robbery.

These rules operate at every level.

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Revealed: Blackwater Still Working in Iraq for John McCain-linked 'Non-Profit'
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports on June 10, 2009 at 10:45 AM.

It seems as though every week there is a new lawsuit filed against Blackwater for the killing of civilians in Iraq. While the Justice Department has failed to prosecute most of these cases (the September 2007 Nisour Square massacre being an exception), attorney Susan Burke has dedicated a substantial part of her practice to holding the company responsible for its crimes. She works in cooperation with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Not only is Burke representing the victims of Nisour Square in their civil suit, and the family of an Iraqi guard allegedly murdered by a drunken Blackwater operative, but she has filed at least a half a dozen other cases against the company. “Erik Prince, a modern-day merchant of death, acts as if he is above the rule of law,” charges Burke.

But beyond the specifics of her lawsuits, Burke is also alleging Blackwater/Xe remains firmly entrenched in Iraq, using affiliate companies like Greystone. She also says Blackwater is working for a “non-profit” organization, started under the Reagan administration, with a history of interference in internal affairs and elections of various nations, including allegations it helped foment a coup in Haiti: the International Republican Institute.

“The Iraqi government has barred Xe-Blackwater from operating in Iraq, and has refused to grant the licenses needed to carry weapons in Iraq,” Burke says.  “Yet Prince continues to provide armed personnel to the International Republican Institute. Such repeated illegal conduct by Prince must be stopped.”

According to SourceWatch:

Loosely affiliated with the Republican Party, the International Republican Insitute (IRI) works closely with the the National Endowment for Democracy and United States foreign policy instruments, including the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development, to support economic and political development programs around the world. The organization is almost exclusively funded by the U.S. government and related agencies.

IRI is also closely linked to Sen. John McCain. According to IRI’s vice president, “Since the summer of 2003, IRI has conducted a multi-faceted program aimed at promoting democracy in Iraq. Toward this end, IRI works with political parties, civil society groups, and government officials and administrators. In support of these efforts, IRI also conducts numerous public opinion research projects and assists its Iraqi partners in the production of radio and television ads and programs.” One IRI grant recipient in Iraq told author Nikolas Kozloff, “Instead of promoting impartial, better understanding of certain ideas and concepts, they [the IRI] are actually trying to further the cause of the Republican administration.” Kozloff notes that in 2005-6 Blackwater donated $30,000 to IRI.

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Debt Collector Harassment: Coming to a Library Near You
Posted by Arthur Delaney, Huffington Post on June 9, 2009 at 7:49 AM.

Since last November, the Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, N.Y. has received a "cease and desist" order from an attorney general or a lawyer in some faraway state every few days. All the letters said basically same thing: Stop your harassment.

"It just became overwhelming," library director Janet Steiner told the Huffington Post. "I have no idea why they chose us."

Apparently a debt collector had been giving the library's address to people from whom it was aggressively trying to recover debt, and those people were handing the address over to their lawyers and local prosecutors.

Call legal threats to your local library a peculiar byproduct of the nationwide economic crisis and a burgeoning debt collection industry. In 2005, debt collectors recovered $51.4 billion nationwide. Two years later, that figure reached $57.9 billion, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers for ACA International, a trade group for the debt industry.

"The story in the industry is that there's more and more debt available. The problem is, it's harder and harder to collect," said ACA spokesman John Nemo in an interview with the Huffington Post.

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The Weirdest Conspiracy Theory of All Time: Republican Chrysler Dealers Targeted by Obama?
Posted by Matt Taibbi, True/Slant on June 1, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

We ran binary logistic regressions across the variables. The results are interesting but the most dramatic was saved dealers v. donations by candidate and/or party.

This puzzled us. Why would there be an significant noticeable (we have rightly been called out for using significant here) and highly positive correlation between dealer survival and Clinton donors? Granted, that P-Value (0.125) isn’t enough to reject the null hypothesis at 95% confidence intervals (our null hypothesis being that the effect is due to random chance), but a 12.5% chance of a Type I error in rejecting a null hypothesis (false rejection of a true hypothesis) is at least eyebrow raising. Most statistians would not call this a “find” as 95% confidence intervals are the gold standard for this sort of work. Nevertheless, it seems clear that something is going on here. Specifically, the somewhat low probability that the Clinton data showing higher survivability of Clinton donors could result just from pure chance. But why not better significance with any of the other variables? Why this stand out?

via Zero Hedge: I Am Marla’s Observations On Artificial Selection In Chrysler Dealerships.

I thought this was a joke when I first heard of it, but apparently it’s circulating as a serious theory, and gaining momentum.

It seems that there has been a lot of grumbling surrounding the closure of certain car dealerships in the the Chrysler wind-down. The company didn’t want to shut down some 25% of its dealerships, but the President’s Automotive Task Force insisted. And once the shutdowns commenced, rumors began to circulate that there were more forced closures of dealerships who contributed heavily to Republican candidates last year than dealerships who gave to Obama or Hillary Clinton.

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Stuck in Your Job Because You Need the Health Benefits? You’re Not Alone.
Posted by Monica Sanchez, Blog for Our Future on May 31, 2009 at 9:01 AM.

In the United States, the majority of people get their health insurance through their job. Many have an immediate need for that coverage, either because they or someone in their families has a health condition that requires ongoing medical care. These are the millions of people for whom losing their employer-based coverage would have dire financial and health consequences. And for many of them, it means staying in a job they would rather leave to keep those health benefits. This phenomenon is referred to as 'job lock.'

Economist Scott Adams has found evidence of pretty wide-spread job lock. His research has found that:

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Stars of Obama's Presidential Campaign Ad Battered By Economy
Posted by Arthur Delaney, Huffington Post on May 29, 2009 at 9:59 AM.

As Election Day neared last fall, the Obama campaign went big with a 30-minute television ad that profiled four American families struggling to keep afloat in a worsening economy. Between each of the "American Stories," as Obama called them, the video showed the candidate on the hustings, promising "a rescue plan for the middle class."

Four months into Obama's presidency, only one of those folks has seen anything resembling a rescue -- and it wasn't because of any government program. After the ad aired, a mysterious angel donor helped cover the costs of surgery and copayments for the Ohio retiree who suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis in her right hand.

But not much has changed for the New Mexico educator. And the Ford employee in Kentucky has been anxiously watching the administration as it guides General Motors into bankruptcy, a process with ripple effects that could cost him his job. Things are bad enough for the fourth person featured, Rebecca Johnston, a 34-year-old mother of four in Missouri, that she has come up with a rescue plan of her own.

Obama said in the ad, Johnston is "all about her family." That's why next week she'll be joining the Army Reserves.

"My kids' ages range between 15 to 3. At this point I look at it like I can't contribute anything to their college, I can barely make their health care costs, we're just skimming by paycheck to paycheck," Johnston told the Huffington Post.

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